Ed McBain - Cinderella

Jewelry, we’ll have to get you something that looks genuine, he’s a fool when it comes to telling a hooker from a nun, but I’m sure he knows Tiffany’s from Woolworth’s. We’ll find something small but tasteful, run up to Bal Harbour one day, shop the better stores. One piece is all we want. Something for just here, do you see? Right where the cleavage begins. Draw his eyes to the bust, not that you need any help, darling, don’t be offended. And shoes. Wonderful shoes to go with the gown. I want you to come into the lounge all starry-eyed and aghast, virtually popping out of the gown, tits, tits, wonderful , looking for someone who should be there but isn’t, Miss Colorado who’s been stood up, searching the room, Oh my goodness where is he, slippers that look as if they’re made of glass, they do wonderful things with plastic nowadays, we’ll find something in Bal Harbour, this will cost us a penny or two, but well worth it.

And we’ll rent a black Caddy, it shouldn’t cost more than twenty, thirty an hour, should it? And of course a chauffeur will accompany you into the lounge. Oh, Charles, where is he? — that’s the chauffeur, Charles — he promised he’d be here. And then a Wasp snit, Oh, wait for me outside, this is so annoying...

Exactly the way it worked.

She came in all breathless and starry-eyed, Junior Prom time except there was a chauffeur in gray behind her, who’d have dreamt she was a hooker going after four, five, six, who-the-fuck-knew keys of cocaine? Ice-blue gown, cost twelve hundred dollars, slippers looking like glass for another three, brooch that looked like a sapphire surrounded by tiny diamonds, fake but gorgeous, who’d have known? You walk in trailed by what looks like a real chauffeur, everything else looks real.

They were going for the gold.

She sits at the bar, looking at her watch. Seventy-five dollars, but it looks expensive. If the chauffeur looks real, the sapphire looks real, the watch becomes real, too. Only real thing here is a hooker from LA who knows this is her ticket out of the life. One last trick. No more hands on her after this one. After this one, she won’t have to look rich, she’ll really be rich. Meanwhile, she’s the fake rancher’s daughter from Colorado. Annoyed. Tapping her foot in the looks-like-glass slipper. The chauffeur pops in every six minutes, wants to know is she going to wait any longer or should they start for the party? She keeps telling him another five minutes, that’s all I’ll give him, waiting for Pudgy to make his move. Pudgy keeps watching her. Does he suspect a scam? He’s sort of cute, actually, with cheeks you want to pinch and a Bugs Bunny smile. She is not going to give him much longer. If she sits here at the bar another two minutes, he’ll know she’s a hooker with a gimmick and he’ll run for the hills.

The girl, Kim, the one who tipped them to this, she said she gave him twenty minutes before he made his move. Sat at the bar like an actress-singer. Talking about clubs she’d played, off-Broadway shows she’d done. Took him twenty minutes before he got off his fat ass, sitting on one of the brocaded banquettes — the Kasbah Lounge, right? Red embroidery with little mirrors sewn in — twenty minutes to make his move.

Jenny’s about to leave. The chauffeur pops in yet another time.

“Miss Carmody?” he says.

Note of servile impatience in his voice.

She looks at her fake watch supposed to cost seventy-five hundred dollars, cost only seventy-five, she sighs in exasperation, and swings the bar stool around, long ice-blue gown slit to Siberia, you can see all the way to eternity if you care to look because she isn’t wearing any panties. And all at once — will miracles never? — Pudgy comes off the banquette just as she’s heading for the door, and he says something like, “What a pity, has your friend been delayed?”

Spanish accent.

She looks at him like he’s a roach flew up into her face.

“I beg your pardon,” she says.

Nose smelling something vile in the gutter.

From the door, the chauffeur says, “Miss Carmody, shall I bring the car around?”

“Yes, please,” she says.

Pudgy says, “Forgive me.”

She says, “Excuse me, but would you please get out of my way?”

He says, “I know you must be upset...”

“Please,” she says, playing it to the hilt, the single word saying Who wants anything to do with you , you greasy little spic?

He says, “Perhaps a liqueur would make you feel a little better.”

She thinks of the joke about the waiter saying to the prudish British lady “Liqueurs, madame?” and the lady swats him with her purse because she thinks he said “Lick yours, madame?”

She looks deep into Pudgy’s eyes, as though trying to fathom his intentions, trying to determine whether he is a pimp or a pusher or a South American rancher and from the door the chauffeur says again “Miss Carmody?”

“Come,” Pudgy says, “let’s have a liqueur. My name is Luis Amaros, I am a banana importer,” and she thinks Yeah the way I am a research scientist at IBM.

A half-hour later, she starts telling him how at the University of Denver when she was the Snow Festival Queen, some guys brought in some cocaine from Los Angeles, and oh wow, that was the most exciting time in her life though Daddy would have killed her if he’d found out.

Pudgy looks at her. She knows he is thinking that all Anglo girls will suck his dick to oblivion if he lays some coke on them.

He says, “Will you still be going to this party?”

“What party?” she says.

“Your friend...”

“Oh, him ,” she says, her heart leaping because she’s such a dumb cunt. “The hell with him ,” she says, and wonders if she’s using language too strong for a rancher’s daughter from Denver. “Forty minutes late already, I mean fuck him ,” she says, figuring it’s only hookers who watch their language until they’re in bed, ladies say whatever the fuck they feel like saying.

He buys it.

She must be a lady.

She just said fuck.

“If you want to come to my place,” he says, “I have something that might interest you.”

She says, cautiously, “Oh?”

“Would you like to come home with me?” he says, and smiles. “Cenicienta? Would you like to come home with me?”

“I’m not that kind of girl,” she says, and wonders if she’s playing too much Doris Day. “And what does that mean, what you just said?”

“ Cenicienta? ” he says. “That means Cinderella.” He glances at her legs. “In your glass slippers.”

“They do look like glass, don’t they?” she says, and smiles.

“So?” he says. “What do you think?”

“I really don’t know,” she says.

“It’s entirely up to you,” he says.

“You are awfully cute,” she says.

He says nothing.

“What is it that you have?” she asks. “That might interest me?”

“Blow,” he says.

She blinks at him.

“Blow? What’s that, blow?”

She’s thinking if you come from Denver, you’re not supposed to know blow means coke, right?

He lowers his voice.

“What you had in Denver,” he says. “What your friends brought from LA.”

“Oh,” she says.

Comes the dawn.

“Mmm,” he says.

“Gee.”

“Mmm.”

“Wow.”

“So?”

“Sure,” she says.

And she’s home free.

Jimmy Legs showed Stagg the picture.

“Where’d you get this?” Stagg asked.

“I found it in somebody’s office,” Jimmy said.